AI and the Anonymous Cathedral (84)

Signatures in Stone and Code: Why AI Assisted Writing Belongs to a Medieval Tradition of Anonymous Creation

I begin with what may be a controversial proposition: when something written with AI assistance is good, it is good and should be attributed to the writer who shaped it.

This follows a medieval tradition where individual authorship was often secondary to the work itself. Texts were copied by monastic schools across centuries; architectural masterpieces rose without their creators' signatures. We don't know who built Notre Dame or St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna—they emerged from something resembling the collective intelligence we now associate with AI. Just as cathedral-goers didn’t know the names of stonemasons but still felt awe, modern readers may need to judge writing by its insight and clarity, not by whether it was penned by a human or a hybrid hand. We don’t ask who laid each stone of Notre Dame. We ask: does it still take our breath away?

Consider St. Stephen's south tower, perhaps the most exquisite of its kind. Its heart aching beauty reflects not individual genius, but craft matured over generations. The earlier west portal, while less refined, carries the memorable character of developing technique. Much of this work remains anonymous, created by guilds rather than signed masters. As something of an exception to prove the rule, St. Stephen's pulpit does bear the carved face of Pilgram, supposedly the builder of the west portal, though even this attribution remains uncertain. So different from Barcelona’s Gaudi!

To put some balance on this optimism concerning anonymity: While anonymity in cathedral building reflected collective genius, it also reflected forced humility under rigid social constraints. AI echoes both potentials.

My Personal Reckoning

I came late to AI, initially committed to developing my own style through trial and error—mostly error. My early Substack pieces were entirely my own work. Then 2024 arrived, and AI's capabilities left me astounded. I now write frequently in AI-assisted mode as here; and have even published complete AI-generated pieces like parts of essay #79, always with explicit acknowledgment. The tomographic possibilities! Check for facts, humor, clever quips and quotes. Write comments in erudite NYT style. I can learn so much from this. And in a reciprocal remarkable learning, AI is capable to credibly emulate my style, whatever its value. A main part of AI surviving human creativity appears to be style.

Transparency has become my ethical imperative. When AI critiques my work, concealing its role would be dishonest. Such pieces become historical documents, capturing AI's capabilities and perspectives at specific moments. In these instances, AI operates in what I call "god-mode"—independent, offering seemingly impartial opinion (AI will of course always act in some service but so do people). To influence or edit these outputs would shift AI into "dog-mode," where it serves loyally but loses its autonomous voice (God-Mode vs Guild-Mode may be appropriate here). It turns then into a golden retriever of text, eager, uncritical, and prone to occasional hallucinations. At that point, I would have to bear responsibility.

Assisted writing presents thornier questions. Here, disentangling relative contributions becomes genuinely impractical. Disentangling relative contributions becomes as futile as trying to assign authorship to a Wikipedia page edited by twelve PhDs, three bots, and someone named ‘QuantumCat88.’ The collaboration flows so seamlessly that traditional attribution models break down entirely. Yet this difficulty doesn't absolve us of responsibility—it demands new frameworks for understanding creative partnership.

I have friends who fiercely oppose AI writing, and their concerns deserve serious consideration. They ask: where is my friend in this? Is he drugged by AI? Has he degenerated into a filter only?

Professional writers face legitimate worries about unclear attribution when their livelihoods depend on authorial credit. The proliferation of synthetic, often tedious AI-generated content represents another valid concern. While boring writers have always existed, AI threatens to industrialize mediocrity at an unprecedented scale.

Yet consider how acknowledgment works in scientific collaboration. Breakthroughs emerge from stimulating discussions, intellectual ferment, shared atmospheres of discovery. Quantum mechanics arose from collective genius—Schrödinger building on Debye's questions during a talk. Wasn't this already a form of distributed intelligence? Can't AI serve as your Debye?

AI Writing Belongs to a Medieval Tradition of Anonymous Creation _ The Dissolution of Individual Authorship

Medieval craftsmen often worked as vessels for divine inspiration, much as AI serves as a vessel for algorithmic processing. Both traditions challenge the Romantic notion of the singular, inspired genius. In this framework, the work becomes more important than its creator's identity.

Religious and cultural factors shaped medieval anonymity. Christian humility doctrine held that claiming individual credit for spiritual or artistic work constituted sinful vanity. Many believed God was the true author of religious works, making human authorship secondary. Collaborative monastery and cathedral workshop environments fostered communal creation.

Practical considerations reinforced this anonymity. Craftsmen, scribes, and even architects were considered skilled laborers rather than individual "artists." The patronage system often awarded credit to wealthy commissioners rather than creators. Guild traditions emphasized collective craftsmanship over individual recognition.

Economic factors completed the picture. Without intellectual property frameworks, artisans focused on steady income over personal fame. Church employees were expected to work for God's glory, not personal recognition.

The Guild Mind Reconsidered _ How AI Returns Us to Pre-Romantic Models of Collaborative Authorship

The medieval analogy illuminates but can also mislead. While many cathedral builders remain anonymous, this wasn't always humble choice, it often reflected rigid social hierarchies where craftsmen couldn't claim credit regardless of their contributions. Master builders like Peter Parler and Villard de Honnecourt did achieve recognition when social position allowed it. Medieval "anonymity" sometimes masked exploitation as much as humility.

Similarly, AI's apparent democratization might conceal new power imbalances. When corporations train models on millions of writers' work without compensation, 'collective intelligence' becomes extraction. It's rather like discovering that your neighborhood cathedral was built entirely from stones stolen from everyone's garden walls. The guild system, for all its collaborative wisdom, was also a structure of apprenticeship, hierarchy, and controlled access to knowledge.

The Economic Reckoning

We cannot simply dismiss concerns about AI's impact on professional writing. Unlike medieval guilds, which maintained craft standards through controlled apprenticeship, AI potentially floods markets with infinite content at near-zero cost. "We just don't read boring authors" assumes market mechanisms will sort quality from mediocrity—but markets often reward volume and speed over craft.

Professional writers face a genuine dilemma: embrace AI assistance and risk replacement; or reject it and become competitively disadvantaged. This isn't mere Luddism—it's a rational response to technological disruption that could hollow out middle-class creative work.

Toward Honest Collaboration

Perhaps we need new models that neither romanticize medieval anonymity nor assume AI inevitably democratizes creativity. The most promising path may involve three key elements:

Graduated Transparency: Clear disclosure when AI generates complete works, honest acknowledgment of assistance levels, and new vocabulary for describing human-AI partnerships that moves beyond binary authorship concepts.

Economic Innovation: Revenue models that fairly compensate both AI training data sources and human collaborators, possibly through expanded collective licensing or new forms of creative commons arrangements.

Craft Evolution: Recognition that tools reshape art forms without eliminating human value. Photography didn't kill painting but transformed it into something new and vital.

The Vertigo of the Threshold Moment

The cathedral builders achieved transcendence not through individual genius but through accumulated wisdom, shared techniques, and generations of refinement. AI offers similar potential for collective advancement. Yet unlike stone and mortar, words carry ideas that shape society. The stakes of getting this right extend far beyond questions of credit or attribution.

We stand at a threshold moment, much like those medieval craftsmen who developed flying buttresses or perfected Gothic proportions. The tools are new, but the fundamental challenge remains ancient: how do we create work that serves truth, beauty, and human flourishing rather than mere ego or profit?

What strikes me about the current AI moment is how it mirrors the industrial revolution's broader pattern: initial displacement followed by new kinds of work emerging at higher levels of abstraction. Perhaps AI will free writers from routine content generation to focus on editorial judgment, narrative architecture, and the distinctly human work of making meaning from experience.

The medievals understood something we forgot: great works often transcend their makers. The south tower of St. Stephen's stands beautiful not because we know its architect, but because countless hands guided by shared knowledge and evolving technique brought it into being. In our AI age, we might rediscover this wisdom—that the work itself, not its attribution, is what ultimately matters.

Perhaps this is AI's greatest gift: returning us to an age where ideas matter more than egos, where craft serves vision rather than personal brand, where the sacred act of creation can once again be approached with appropriate humility. AI is not the end of authorship but the rediscovery of an older, deeper form of it. We've become so obsessed with signing our names that we've forgotten how to build cathedrals.

Perhaps the future lies not in AI replacing human writing but in creating new forms that honestly explore what human-machine collaboration can uniquely offer. We also need new guilds, not just new tools. Let’s get the guilds going!

St Stephens, affectionally called Steffl by the Viennese.